Another business lesson from the kitchen: the order matters

I mentioned in a previous post how I love to cook and often have a cooking show on while I'm preparing dinner at night. I was watching Emeril as he made a bolognese sauce (which I tried along with him and it turned out fantastic!) and he commented that when you start by putting the olive oil and bacon into the pot you need to wait to add the onions and garlic and other ingredients. If you add everything all at once the moisture from the vegetables will prevent the bacon from crisping which needs to happen in order to get the full desired flavor.

In other words, using the proper order matters just as much as using the right ingredients.

Let's switch gears. Business. You're trying to make something work better, cheaper, faster. You've got a gal that's a black belt in Six Sigma. You have a guy who did a stint at Toyota and loves Lean. And you've got another gal who loves the Theory of Constraints or TOC. Do you throw them all at the problem all at once and say, "have at it"? You can, but I wouldn't.

If you have those three skill sets in-house you're fortunate. You have the ingredients you need. But the order in which you deploy these resources matters just as much in business as it does in cooking. The research that's coming out in the continuous process improvement literature strongly suggests using TOC as a focusing mechanism to determine the optimal place to start. You can't work on everything all at once and you need to know where to focus first. Bring in your TOC expert. Then bring in your Lean SME to reduce waste, then your Six Sigma person. These results will typically yield far better results than trying to "cook" the approaches all at once.

What works even better is to have a person, a firm, a team that not only knows each discipline well but also how they work together--the Integrated TOC/Lean/Six Sigma (iTLS) approach pioneered by Bob Fox and others. Instead of having one person cook the pasta, someone else come in to make the sauce, a third to make a salad, and someone else to plate it, you just bring in a chef who can do it all. Ideally, bring in a chef that can teach you how to make the dish yourself the next time.

Business Lessons from my Kitchen

I love to cook. If I had to estimate how much of the household cooking I do between breakfasts, packing lunches, dinners, and snacks for impromptu jam sessions when all my teenage son's rock band friends show up hungry...I'd peg it at, say...100%. I do it all, and I enjoy it.

That means Dad is watching lots of cooking shows at night to get ideas. Which means I see all these gorgeous, well-stocked, hyper-organized kitchens on TV (well on Apple TV, we got rid of cable). I took a look at my own kitchen the other day and realized how disorganized the drawers and pantries were and made a little run to Bed Bath & Beyond and Williams-Sonoma and came back with a bunch of containers, trays, and Lazy Susan turntables. A few hours later and my kitchen is now way more organized and much more usable.

"Good for you Randy! I'm just so glad I took the time to read your blog today so I could learn about your kitchen cupboards!", I hear you thinking to yourself. Well here's the first point: I'm a 40-year-old reasonably intelligent man who spends lots of time in my kitchen. It took me years to really get organized. And here's the second point: even after I got things in order and began feeling a sense of pride every time I opened the pantry door my fridge was a complete mess! I didn't think to put a Lazy Susan in my refrigerator to organize all the jars of sauce and jams and capers and olives until TODAY! Why? I guess because Lazy Susan's are for cupboards, I don't know. I'm still scratching my head as to why it took me so long to figure this out. Don't tell anyone. But I can say it's like 50 times easier now to find stuff in my fridge.

There are a few lessons here. Maybe you're the warehouse manager of a 100,000 square foot regional distribution center and are going on your seventh year with the company. Or maybe you've worked your way up to running a 23 person accounts receivable division at a large firm. Regardless of where you find yourself, I'll bet you're so busy you have a corner of your responsibility that's basically a junk drawer--something that bugs you but not so much that you stop what you're doing to fix it. Consider fixing it. I've found over and over that often times one of the most productive things I can do when I'm feeling overwhelmed is to pause and take a few minutes to get organized. It's amazing how those few minutes can then affect all the rest of your work minutes from then on.

The second lesson is that there are probably simple, tried-and-true, relatively easy-to-implement solutions from other industries or disciplines that would apply really well to your shop that you don't know about. Or worse, maybe you know about them (the Lazy Susan) but have not connected the dots to see how they would apply to another problem area of yours (the fridge). This is where I think consultants often earn their money. Sometimes the main source of value they bring is to walk into your situation that you know like the back of your hand with a fresh set of eyes and a memory full of solutions and best practices from lots of other companies and situations and help you see patterns or opportunities you could not on your own. Consultants sometimes get a bad rap for walking over to the cupboard and taking the Lazy Susan from the shelf and putting it in the fridge and then sending you a nice invoice. But then cooking life from then on is so much better. And if it were so easy why had no one in your firm done that already for the past 12 years you've been in business?

So there you go. Life lessons from my kitchen.

Just Add Water

So I'm in the grocery store looking for some household cleaner and come across Arm & Hammer's Essentials. At first glance it looks like they are selling an empty bottle.

Then I notice the tiny little extra bottle attached to the empty one that apparently contains the real cleaning agent. It dawns on me that all the other "full" bottles on the shelf are trying to sell me water. Hmmm.

I would imagine this product (although not a new idea, really) kind of upsets the apple cart in the cleaning solution industry. It changes the game and makes all the other guys look bad. I may be wrong, but I'd think selling water + special sauce is fairly profitable vs selling just your concentrate. But it was bound to happen. Better to be the first one in than play catch up on this.

So here's a company that deliberately put out a product that would cannibalize its profits. But it positions itself as the brand that's on the side of the consumer--not other cleaning solution suppliers--and that's significant. Customer trust and loyalty go way up. And there's now kind of a dark cloud floating over other "full bottle" brands that wasn't there a few moments before. But the point is that the consumer still ultimately gets a full bottle of cleaner--but cheaper.

It made me think about some advice I got early on as a new consultant: a good consultant comes in and solves a problem. A great consultant comes in, solves a problem, but does it in such a way that she/he teaches you how to solve part or all of that problem on your own in the future. There will probably always be some special sauce that you have as a consultant that your client will not--even if it's just the perspective you have that comes from dealing with multiple clients across many industries over several years or the skill or "touch" you've built up over time that can't be faked (watch a good drywall guy and you'll know what I mean).

So here's the takeaway:

1. If you're a business using outside consultants, ask yourself if she/he is leaving behind some capability with your internal people. If not, find another consultant.
2. If you're a consultant, ask yourself what is something that you do that you charge for that you could transmit to your client over time and start letting them add their own water.

Imagine a plumber or an electrician that comes to your house to fix a problem, but rather than just diving in and taking care of the issue while you're off checking email or something, they offer to show you how to fix it so you can save a $100 trip charge if that problem ever comes up again. In my book, just the offer would be enough for me to designate that person my plumber or electrician for life.

Jason Fried from 37signals has been talking about similar ideas for a while now. I'd encourage you to watch or listen to as much of his content as you can. And just boil your service offering down to its essentials.